Parimal

In the burning heat of Madras in 1946, a young man walks the dusty streets carrying a heavy gunny bag filled with colored toy balloons. He sells them directly to street vendors and children, counting out copper coins just to secure his next meal. K.M. Mammen Mappillai belonged to a prominent family in Kerala. His father, K.C. Mammen Mappillai, was the chief editor of the highly influential Malayala Manorama newspaper & a powerful banker. In the late 1938, his father clashed fiercely with Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, the tyrannical Diwan (Prime Minister) of the princely state of Travancore. The state govt locked down the newspaper, seized the family’s assets & shut down their bank, throwing his father into jail. Overnight, 1 of the wealthiest families in the region was left completely bankrupt. By 1946, young Mammen Mappillai had graduated in science from Madras Christian College. He had no money, no ancestral wealth & no place to live, often sleeping on the floors of acquaintances. Refusing to be broken, he pooled a tiny bit of borrowed money & set up a makeshift, completely manual rubber workshop in a small wooden shed in Tiruvottiyur, a suburb of Madras. He called it the Madras Rubber Factory (MRF). He did not have the machines or the capital to build industrial rubber goods, so he chose the cheapest product possible: toy balloons. The early days were pure manual labor. Mammen Mappillai’s wife, who had a background in chemistry, helped him manually mix the rubber latex, dye & chemicals in their home. They hand-dipped wooden templates into the latex mix to form balloons. Once the balloons dried, Mammen Mappillai packed them into gunny bags, walked into the heart of Madras & sold them street by street directly to vendors & children to secure daily cash flow. By 1949, the small shed operation stabilized. They upgraded from just balloons to making latex gloves & cast rubber toys. But Mammen Mappillai knew that selling toys on the street corner would never pull his family out of financial ruin. The watershed moment came in 1952. He noticed that post-war India was experiencing a huge surge in commercial trucking, but the country lacked a domestic supply of tread rubber (the thick, patterned rubber strip used to retread worn out tires to make them reusable). Transportation companies were spending massive foreign exchange importing tread rubber from global giants like Dunlop. Mammen Mappillai made a high-stakes gamble. He took every single rupee he had saved from 6 yrs of selling balloons & toys, abandoned the consumer novelty market & pivoted MRF entirely into heavy industrial manufacturing to make tread rubber. The gamble was a masterstroke. Because his tread rubber was locally manufactured & significantly cheaper than foreign imports, Indian transport operators flocked to MRF. Within just 4 yrs (by 1956), the little balloon shed had captured a staggering 50% market share of all tread rubber sold in India. Having mastered the tread, the final evolutionary step was inevitable: making the actual tire. In 1961, MRF went public & signed a crucial technical partnership with the Mansfield Tire & Rubber Company of the United States. The company came full circle in 1989. Now a massive tire conglomerate, MRF partnered with Hasbro (the world's largest toy maker) to launch Funskool India, bringing the industrial giant right back to its original roots of making toys for children. When K.M. Mammen Mappillai was awarded the Padma Shri in 1992, he was no longer the bankrupt student sleeping on the floors of acquaintances. He was the architect of a global empire. Today, MRF is a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse exporting specialized tyres to 65+ countries, its iconic logo stamped on the bats of the world’s greatest cricketers. It stands as a towering monument to a simple, unyielding truth: you can strip a family of their banks, their buildings & their land, but you can never strip away the relentless, unstoppable drive of a mathematical & entrepreneurial mind determined to rebuild from a single hand-dipped balloon.

1 minor crrection on my part regarding the Vimag labs' post. Claiming Vimag Labs is India's 1st magnet-free motor company overlooks the deep-tech groundwork laid down yrs prior. Both Vimag Labs (founded in 2025 by Manish Kumar Seth & Krishna Murthy Rahul) & Chara Technologies (founded around 2019) are racing toward the absolute holy grail of the modern green transition: building high-efficiency, magnet-free electric motors. Chara Technologies was founded by veteran engineer Bhaktha Keshavachar (who previously co-founded Ezetap, a fintech/mPOS company acquired by Razorpay), along with Ravi Prasad Sharma &dMahalingam Koushik. Instead of permanent magnets, Chara uses Synchronous Reluctance (SynRM) & Switched Reluctance (SRM) motor topologies. In these motors, the magnetic field is created entirely by the clever design of the steel rotor & complex electrical pulses sent through the copper windings, bypassing permanent magnets entirely. The reason why traditional industries did not use SynRM motors in consumer vehicles is that they are notoriously difficult to control, loud & prone to torque ripples. Chara solved this with a heavy IP layer: they designed custom cloud-controlled power electronics & ML algos that dynamically stabilize the motor's performance in real time. Chara raised a $6M Series A funding round led by Arkam Ventures, with aggressive backing from prominent deep-tech VCs like Kalaari Capital, Exfinity Venture Partners & IIMA Ventures. With their Series A capital, they built a state-of-the-art automated factory and testing facility in BLR, scaling their annual production capacity from 20K units to 100K units per yr. They are targeting 2 wheelers, 3 wheelers & commercial HVAC applications. They both (& other players for sure) will ultimately provide India with complete geopolitical autonomy over its domestic electric vehicle supply chains.

Amidst all the SM noise, we did not celebrate Vimag labs enough. They built India’s 1st software-defined, magnet-free electric motor platform. Standard EVs rely heavily on Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors. These require physical, rare-earth magnets embedded directly into the motor's rotor to create a magnetic field. Vimag Labs completely eliminated the physical magnets. This is a win for cheaper EV manufacturing, but the real, strategic importance of what they did goes far deeper into global geopolitics & structural engineering: - The global processing capacity & supply chain for rare-earth materials is overwhelmingly controlled by China. By engineering a completely magnet-free motor, Vimag Labs quietly handed automotive OEMs an escape hatch from a massive geopolitical supply chain vulnerability. - Vimag Labs designed this architecture to scale up into massive high-power systems ranging b/w 200 kW & 600 kW. This means the software-defined, magnet-free platform is directly targeted for critical, heavy backend sectors: defense applications, robotics & advanced cooling infra, allowing India to build high-performance military & industrial hardware entirely free from foreign mineral dependencies. - The breakthrough is the result of 87600+ (~10 person yrs) engineering hrs spent by co-founders Manish Seth, Rahul Krishnamurthy & their team. They built a massive IP pipeline (including 5 granted patents, 10 active applications & 15 trademarks) & signed a manufacturing MoU with Jendamark to scale the physical production of these motors right out of India. Vimag labs handed a rising nation the ultimate industrial escape hatch: a future where our engines run on Indian brainpower, while leaving the rest of the world fighting over the dirt. 🙏🙏

Mileage is not distance divided by litres of fuel burnt. This is a misconception. You have to go to a service station where a special mileage computer can only tell the mileage. Science is done, now finish the maths